Hoax story has holes

Tom Coyne Associated Press

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Timeline

Chronology of how the fake girlfriend story grew:

Sept. 13: Asked by reporters, Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly says Te’o will play against Michigan State that Saturday despite the deaths that week of two people close to him. Media reports the next day identify the two as his grandmother and his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua.

Sept. 15: Te’o has 12 tackles and breaks up two passes and the Irish win 20-3 at Michigan State. Te’o says afterward “I lost two women that I truly love” and that he had “my girlfriend’s family around me.”

Sept. 23: In a one-on-one interview with Sports Illustrated, Te’o talks at length about his relationship with Kekua and her many health issues, making only one vague reference to meeting her for the first time in California in 2009. He told SI they had been dating for a year.

Oct. 1: A Sports Illustrated cover story describes how Te’o received a call from Kekua’s older brother informing him of her death.

Oct. 3: Te’o says at a media availability that during the walk-through before the Irish’s Sept. 22 game against Michigan, he asked what time it was and realized Kekua’s casket had been closed a minute earlier. He says she wanted him to skip her funeral to play.

Oct. 12: A South Bend Tribune article, based on information from Te’o’s father, describes how Te’o and Kekua met at a 2009 game at Stanford. Te’o’s father, Brian, says she would visit him in Hawaii.

Nov. 14: In an Associated Press story, Te’o says that “every morning I wake up and my girlfriend is not on the phone. It reminds me that she’s gone. That’s the hardest part.”

Dec. 8: South Bend television station WSBT shoots video of Te’o saying in a pre-Heisman interview in New York, “I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer.” That’s two days after the date given by Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick for when Te’o found out about the hoax.

Dec. 9: At the Lott Impact Awards dinner, Te’o says that Kekua “made me promise, when it happened, that I would stay and play.”

Jan. 5: At the media day before the BCS title game, Te’o talks about his travails during the season, saying, “My team was always there for me, and my family was always there for me.”

SOUTH BEND —
Not once but twice after he supposedly discovered his online girlfriend of three years never existed, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o perpetuated the heartbreaking story about her death.

An Associated Press review of news coverage found that the Heisman Trophy runner-up talked about his doomed love in a Web interview Dec. 8 and again in a newspaper interview published Dec. 10. He and the university said Wednesday that he learned on Dec. 6 that it was all a hoax, that not only wasn’t she dead, she wasn’t real.

On Thursday, a day after Te’o’s inspiring, playing-through-heartache story was exposed as a bizarre lie, Te’o and Notre Dame faced questions from sports writers and fans about whether he really was duped, as he claimed, or whether he and the university were complicit in the hoax and misled the public.

Yahoo sports columnist Dan Wetzel said the case has “left everyone wondering whether this was really the case of a naïve football player done wrong by friends or a fabrication that has yet to play to its conclusion.”

Gregg Doyel, national columnist for CBSSports.com, wrote was more direct.

“Nothing about this story has been comprehensible, or logical, and that extends to what happens next,” he wrote. “I cannot comprehend Manti Te’o saying anything that could make me believe he was a victim.”

On Wednesday, Te’o and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said the player was drawn into a virtual romance with a woman who used the phony name Lennay Kekua and was fooled into believing she died of leukemia in September. They said his only contact with the woman was via the Internet and telephone.

Te’o also lost his grandmother – for real – the same day his girlfriend supposedly died, and his role in leading Notre Dame to its best season in decades endeared him to fans and put him at the center of college football’s biggest feel-good story of the year.

Relying on information provided by Te’o’s family members, the South Bend Tribune reported in October that Te’o and Kekua first met, in person, in 2009, and that the two had also gotten together in Hawaii, where Te’o grew up.

Sports Illustrated posted a previously unpublished transcript of a one-on-one interview with Te’o from Sept. 23. In it, he goes into great detail about his relationship with Kekua and her physical ailments. He also mentioned meeting her for the first time after a game in California.

Among the outstanding questions Thursday: Why didn’t Te’o ever clarify the nature of his relationship as the story took on a life of its own?

Te’o’s agent, Tom Condon, said the athlete had no plans to make any public statements Thursday in Bradenton, Fla., where he has been training with other NFL hopefuls, including Irish tight end and Bishop Dwenger grad Tyler Eifert, at the IMG Academy.

Notre Dame said Te’o found out that Kekua was not a real person through a phone call he received at an awards ceremony in Orlando, Fla., on Dec. 6. He told Notre Dame coaches about the situation on Dec. 26.

The AP’s media review turned up two instances during that gap when Te’o mentioned Kekua in public.

Te’o was in New York for the Heisman presentation on Dec. 8 and, during an interview before the ceremony that ran on WSBT.com, the website for a South Bend TV station, Te’o said: “I mean, I don’t like cancer at all. I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer. So I’ve really tried to go to children’s hospitals and see, you know, children.”

In a column that first ran in the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 10, Te’o recounted why he played a few days after he found out Kekua died in September, and the day she was supposedly buried.

“She made me promise, when it happened, that I would stay and play,” he said on Dec. 9 while attending a ceremony in Newport Beach, Calif., for the Lott Impact Awards.

On Wednesday, when Deadspin.com broke the story, Swarbrick said Notre Dame did not go public with its findings sooner because it expected the Te’o family to come forward first.

Asked if the NCAA was monitoring the Te’o story for possible rules violations, NCAA President Mark Emmert said:

“We don’t know anything more than you do,” he told reporters at the organization’s convention in Dallas. “We’re learning about this through the stories just the same as you are. But we have to wait and see what really transpired there. It’s obviously (a) very disturbing story, and it’s hard to tell where the facts lie at this point.

“But Notre Dame is obviously looking into it and there will be a lot more to come forward. Right now, it just looks ... well, we don’t know what the facts are, so I shouldn’t comment beyond that.”

Reporters were turned away at the main gate of IMG’s secure complex. Te’o remained on the grounds, said a person familiar with situation.